Cooking School History

The New Haven Restaurant Institute was not America’s first cooking school. Beginning in the eighteenth century, traveling experts had offered cooking lessons to students in their homes—usually to young women, whose chances for marriage were enhanced by culinary proficiency. The shift from such private lessons to public courses was made by Elizabeth Goodfellow, a pastry cook and confectioner who, in the early nineteenth century, began offering cookery lessons in her Philadelphia pastry shop. Another cooking school, established in the mid-nineteenth century, was that of Pierre Blot, a French immigrant who lectured on culinary arts. The school lasted only a few years, but it inspired the next phase of American cooking schools, which taught new immigrants and the poor.

A New York librarian named Juliet Corson volunteered, in 1873, to work at the Women’s Educational and Industrial Society, which offered free courses in sewing, bookkeeping, and the like to poor women in hopes of helping them find work. Believing that cookery instruction would prepare women for domestic employment, the society’s managers asked Juliet Corson to teach a cooking class. Her work at the society attracted the attention of her well-to-do acquaintances, who encouraged her to open her own cooking school. Corson did just that, in 1876. She also wrote several books based on her lectures, including Cooking School Text Book and Housekeepers Guide to Cookery and Kitchen Management, a textbook that was adopted by cooking schools in other cities. Following Corson’s lead, similar schools opened in Philadelphia, under the direction of Sarah Tyson Rorer, and in Boston, first under the direction of Mary J. Lincoln and later under Fannie Merritt Farmer. When Farmer left the school in 1902, she opened Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery, which operated until 1944.

Another type of cooking school was based at colleges and universities. These schools were originally intended to prepare women for life as homemakers, but they later became vocationally directed. The first-known cookery program at a college was at Iowa Agricultural School, in Ames (later Iowa State University). The school began offering a course in domestic economy in 1876. Similar programs were instituted at other colleges and universities around the nation. The course work usually included topics such as dietetics, household science, bread making, and many others. A number of graduates of these college programs went on to teach in public schools, and many also became leaders in the home economics movement. Other university programs, such as Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, which opened in 1922, offered courses for students studying hotel restaurant management.

The CIA

Sarah Tyson Rorer—the founder of the Philadelphia Cooking School and author of almost a hundred popular cookbooks—first recognized the problem that would confront the food-service industry for decades to come: the lack of trained culinary professionals. In 1914, she predicted correctly that the lack of labor would create a need for cooking specialists, who would “command big salaries because they can direct a large staff of workers.”¹

Historically, many cooks and other restaurant workers in the United States were immigrants. When Congress began restricting immigration during the 1920s, this source of cheap labor disappeared. Although labor was not a problem during the Depression, it did became a serious issue, especially for restaurants, during World War II, when 25 million American men and women went into the military and millions more went to work for businesses directly related to the war effort. At the time, there was no system for training culinary professionals in the United States. This left restaurants with few professional workers or executives in their kitchens.

The New Haven Restaurant Association, with 300 restaurateurs and fifty wholesalers and suppliers as members, took on the problem of the wartime labor shortage. The association’s founder, Richard Dargen, and the executive secretary, Charles Rovetti, thought up an unusual solution for at least part of their labor problem. In 1943, they approached William Cronin, the war manpower commissioner in New Haven, and, a few months later, area restaurants were declared an “essential industry,” which meant that all employees were frozen in their positions. The restaurant labor force in New Haven was thus stabilized, but there was still a shortage of trained professional chefs.²

To solve this second problem, Dargen and Rovetti discussed the possibility of opening a school for training culinary professionals. What gave impetus to the idea was the passage, in June 1944, of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act. This unprecedented law, also known as the G.I. Bill, permitted returning servicemen to attend college at government expense. If the New Haven Restaurant Association’s cooking school could get accredited, returning servicemen could take its courses for free while the federal government picked up the tab.

In late 1945, the association leased a building to house both its offices and a new cooking school, which was initially called the New Haven Restaurant Institute. Frances Roth was selected to be the school’s director. She formed a partnership with Katharine Angell, who was made president and chair of the board. Angell sought funds to support the fledgling institution. Roth called on Alonzo Grace, the Connecticut commissioner of education, who helped get the institute accredited so that returning servicemen could qualify for financial assistance under the G.I. Bill. The New Haven Restaurant Association, the City of New Haven, and the New Haven Civic Association all helped fund the renovation of the building, and manufacturers of kitchen equipment supplied the latest professional-grade appliances.³

Before the school opened, Roth and Angell made an important decision: they incorporated the institute as a not-for-profit educational organization, rendering it independent of the New Haven Restaurant Association. Roth selected a board of directors, hired staff, and created a program with both hands-on cooking classes and professional restaurant management. The institute’s doors opened in May 1946 with sixteen students, but the second class, entering in the fall of that year, doubled to thirty-five. In anticipation of larger and larger classes, the school bought a mansion in 1947 and transferred its operations there. The same year, the school completely severed its connections with the New Haven Restaurant Association and changed its name to the Restaurant Institute of America. In 1951, the name was changed once again, this time to the Culinary Institute of America. By 1965, the CIA had 300 students. Roth’s and Angell’s successors upgraded the faculty, established a core curriculum, and began publishing a manual, The Professional Chef, which was revised several times and served as the school’s bible for many years.⁴

It wasn’t long before increasing enrollment had outgrown the New Haven mansion, and in 1971, the institute purchased a former Jesuit seminary in Hyde Park, eighty miles north of New York City. After its move from Connecticut, the CIA acquired a charter from New York State permitting it to award associate’s degrees, thus becoming the first culinary school in America to offer a degree. The large Hyde Park campus also permitted the construction of dormitories, and the CIA became the first culinary school to offer a residential program. Courses at the relocated CIA began in September 1972, and by 1980, the school had 1,300 students and an annual budget approaching $3 million. In 1993, the CIA began offering a bachelor’s degree. Two years later, the institute opened a second campus, north of San Francisco, at Greystone in the Napa Valley.⁵ In 2001, the CIA had assets of more than $164 million. By 2007, more than 37,000 students had graduated from the CIA, and many of its graduates have made their careers as professional cooks.

The Competition

The CIA’s success—and a growing interest in culinary matters generally—brought a wave of new cooking schools to America. Celebrity chefs, such as James Beard and Dione Lucas, opened cooking schools that flourished for years. Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School, which opened in 1978 in a cramped brownstone kitchen, evolved into the Institute for Culinary Education, which each year enrolls about 23,000 students in full-time and avocational programs. The French Culinary Institute, in New York, was started by Dorothy Cann (later Hamilton) in 1984; she had been impressed and inspired on a visit to a culinary school in France.⁶ On its faculty was Alain Sailhac, formerly of Le Cirque, Jacques Pépin, the respected cookbook author and television celebrity, and André Soltner, longtime chef at New York’s restaurant Lutèce. Jacques Torres, another Le Cirque alumnus, became dean of the school’s pastry program.⁷

The CIA’s main competition, however, was the culinary program at Johnson & Wales, a college founded as a business school in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1914. In 1963, the school was accredited to offer associate’s degrees in the arts and sciences, and in 1970, its program was expanded to award baccalaureate degrees.

However, Johnson & Wales faltered due to a lack of students, and, in 1972, entrepreneur Morris Gaebe purchased it and became the university’s chancellor. The following year, Gaebe initiated what became the College of Culinary Arts, which offered degree programs in the hospitality and food-service fields. Gaebe hired former CIA instructors and recruited CIA graduates to get the culinary school off the ground, and it soon became the CIA’s first real competitor. In 1984, Johnson & Wales established a campus in Charleston, South Carolina, and schools were also set up in other cities across America and eventually in other countries as well. In 1988, the school’s name was officially changed to Johnson & Wales University. Thousands of students have graduated from its culinary arts program, including the famed chef and television star Emeril Lagasse, who graduated in 1978. By 2007, Johnson & Wales had become the largest food-service educator in the country.

With the success of the CIA and Johnson & Wales, culinary schools have become big business, and several large chains, such as Laureate, Le Cordon Bleu, and the Art Institutes have opened in many cities across the United States.

Professional Results

Culinary schools helped foster respect for the culinary profession by elevating standards through education. Graduates of culinary schools such as the CIA and Johnson & Wales serve as chefs and restaurant managers, and they run thousands of culinary operations behind the scenes. Some opt to work with large commercial food operations, such as CIA graduates Christopher Martone, the executive chef at Subway Restaurants; Steve Ells, the founder of Chipotle Mexican Grill; and Dan Coudreaut, the director of culinary innovation for McDonald’s.

While cooking schools helped professionalize the culinary field, television has enhanced the appeal of a culinary career. Julia Child’s pioneering TV program, The French Chef, was followed by dozens of others, culminating in the launch, in 1993, of the Food Network. Such programs made it possible for a number of chefs—including many CIA and Johnson & Wales graduates—to become television stars. The author and television personality Anthony Bourdain graduated from the CIA, as did restaurant and TV chefs Cat Cora, Charlie Palmer, Rocco DiSpirito, and Todd English. Johnson & Wales’s Emeril Lagasse has hosted several Food Network programs, such as Emeril Live, which reached more than 90 million homes daily.

Culinary schools sprang up in cities across the nation, educating future chefs and culinary professionals. Most programs are similar to those offered by the CIA and Johnson & Wales. By 2001, there were 162 schools awarding degrees in culinary arts. In addition, small private schools continue to offer cooking classes, as do department stores, supermarket chains, restaurants, and hotels. Recreational cooking classes are popular throughout the United States; classes for children and teenagers, for couples, and for groups are offered nationwide. Enrollment in cooking classes in the United States had reached unprecedented levels by the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Postscript

Frances L. Roth remained as the CIA director until 1965. Of her, Craig Claiborne wrote: “All of the world’s great chefs have been men, but the one individual who has probably done more than any other to give fine cuisine a foothold in the United States is a woman. She is Mrs. Frances Roth, a kind and intelligent gem of a person, with a seeming inexhaustible capacity for getting her own way.”⁸ Katharine Angell retired as president and chair of the CIA board in 1966. Today, the CIA’s culinary library is named after her.